'They Shall Not Pass'
WOLFE, HENRY C.
'They Shall Not Pass' THE PRICE OF GLORY: VERDUN 1916 By Alistair Home St Martin's. 371 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by HENRY C. WOLFE Author, "The German Octopus," "The Imperial Soviets" After...
...On some battlefields of Verdun it was different: "Nothing would grow there any more...
...The losses on both sides during the 10 months of combat were unbelievable...
...Reviewed by HENRY C. WOLFE Author, "The German Octopus," "The Imperial Soviets" After World War I the battlescarred fields of Picardy, Artois, the Champagne and the Chemin des Dames ultimately responded to cultivation...
...Forty-seven years ago, the greatest and longest battle of all time was waged at the ancient city on the Meuse...
...The German troops were misled into believing that their objective was the city of Verdun...
...He maintains—with logic—that the effects of Verdun were felt not only during the remainder of World War I but even in World War II...
...Although some of its best industrial regions were in German hands...
...It was a concept that relegated maneuver, grand strategy and the fine arts of war to the background...
...The real heroes at Verdun are the officers below general rank and the "poilus," the common soldiers...
...Yet the poilus fought on: This was their soil...
...Moving, lucid and authentically detailed, his account should long remain the definitive story of the battle of Verdun...
...To nine villages around Verdun, the inhabitants never returned...
...Cyr, who met death with Bayardesque élan...
...they were fighting for their country, for their homes...
...It seemed as if the Almighty wanted Verdun preserved to posterity as the supreme example of man's inhumanity to man...
...To an airman the battlefield looked like the "humid skin of a monstrous toad...
...Part of the answer lay in its strategic location...
...Even the Crown Prince was not privy to this coldblooded plan...
...On the morning he was killed, he was aroused by his orderly "under a tumultuous bombardment...
...Attrition" was plain murder on a colossal scale...
...Shortly before his death, 21-yearold French Lieutenant Joubaire wrote in his diary: "Humanity is mad . . . What scenes of carnage . . . Hell cannot be so terrible...
...Home's assertion that after Verdun "the main burden of the war passed from France to Britain...
...Moreover, the French wartime industrial performance was almost incredible...
...But there was a more sinister reason...
...The Kaiser, whom contemporary propagandists presented as the grand villain of the period, appears less a Brobdingnagian criminal than a chump...
...The German generals Erich von Falkenhayn and Schmidt von Knobelsdorf, come off as traditional blood-and-iron Junkers, militarist villains...
...They believed he held their lives precious, that "if he called for an attack there must be some point to it . . ." Though ill with pneumonia, he set about strengthening his lines, improving the disposition of his artillery and increasing his flow of supplies over the crucial Voie Sacr...
...The weather aggravated the suffering of the soldiers...
...is questionable, too, since in September 1918 the British were holding only 140 kilometers of front, the French 388 kilometers...
...Seldom in the history of war can the commander of a great army have been so cynically deceived as was the Crown Prince by Falkenhayn...
...But the poilus fought back tenaciously...
...The battle of Verdun began in bitterly cold winter weather, dragged on in the heat of summer and ended in winter...
...Many guns had been removed from the forts protecting the city, the field artillery was inadequate, and even the trench systems were not properly equipped for such a test...
...It was Verdun, with its vital position, already fortified by Vauban—and indeed as far back as the Romans— that was the principal strongpoint of, and key to, the whole [French fortress] system...
...In preparation for the offensive, the Germans concentrated the greatest artillery mass in history and enormous amounts of munitions and supplies...
...On Armistice day the French still had in the front line more divisions than the British and Americans together...
...General Noel de Castelnau, who had already lost three sons in the War, decided that Verdun had to be held at all costs...
...an intensification of all its horrors and glories, courage and futility...
...On Côte 304, le Mort Homme and other vital battle spots, combatants burrowed into ground that had been churned by artillery to the point where it was a nauseous compound of flesh, bones, clothing, human filth and earth...
...Despite initial success and the colossal waste of their youth, the Germans did not win at Verdun...
...The Crown Prince, pictured as a ratfaced degenerate, emerges as an almost well-meaning but frustrated man, badly treated by his father and double-crossed by the military...
...For those who remember World War I propaganda, the author's estimates of leading military figures are often surprising...
...the Germans' artillery superiority seemed overwhelming...
...They worked miracles of self-sacrifice, decency and gallantry...
...In the early hours of the battle it looked as if the Germans would smash their way right into the city...
...True, they bled the French Army, but they also bled themselves...
...On February 21, 1916, they opened their attack with a terrific barrage...
...It was truly a Herculean feat...
...They died defending Fort Vaux, holding Souville, counterattacking at Fort Douaumont...
...Great holes were torn in it by the German machine guns and shrapnel, but with a discipline that would have honored the Old Guard, it closed ranks...
...Przemsyl was not a "Russian fortress...
...France's factories re-equipped the Serbian Army, helped equip the Greek forces, provided the British with thousands of aircraft and engines, and supplied the Americans with aircraft, tanks and guns...
...Curiously, though, it was not Petain but Nivelle who uttered the dramatic words "Ils ne passeront pas...
...For the Reich "attrition" destroyed the best of its young men and "contributed a vacuum of leadership in Germany into which rushed the riff-raff of the Himmlers and Goebbels . . ." In a work of such scope and detail as The Price of Glory, slips are almost inevitable...
...At one hundred yards, Macker's men fixed bayonets and charged...
...This involved "attrition," a chilling word to those who served on the Western front...
...When Petain took command at Verdun, the French appeared to be fighting in a doomed cause...
...Concrete bunkers were built near the front lines and shock troops were specially trained for the drive...
...Falkenhayn's "attrition" would "leave an indelible mark on a generation of French and Germans...
...Falkenhayn was feeding in fresh divisions...
...Men are mad...
...Why was Verdun the Germans' main target...
...But Petain enjoyed a unique reputation among the troops...
...Actually, the objective was to kill, and be killed, until their opponents had bled to death...
...Falkenhayn, Chief of the German General Staff, decided that the French Army had to be "bled white" at Verdun...
...Although expecting a push toward Verdun, the French were poorly prepared...
...He "composedly and meticulously groomed himself for the fray, washing his mustachios in pinard, in the absence of water...
...Like a Napoleonic formation, the regiment lined up shoulder to shoulder in three tight echelons, the Colonel at its head brandishing his cane and calmly smoking a cigar...
...The Austrian Conrad von Hotzendorf, whose name was scarcely known in the West, is described as "the unique instance in the First War of where a commander was actually better than the troops he commanded . . ." On the French side, not surprisingly, Joseph Gallieni is lauded...
...Henri Petain is cast in a highly favorable role, but Joseph Joffre is downgraded...
...With the heat came the stench of unburied corpses, swarms of blue flies, and thirst which drove men to drink shell-hole water befouled by bloated bodies...
...There was Colonel Macker, for example, alumnus of St...
...In the process many lives were sacrificed to unexploded shells, but nature and the peasants won out...
...Even today the exact number of casualties is unknown, estimates ranging from 700,000 to a million-and-a-quarter...
...it was an Austrian fortress captured by the Russians and soon recaptured by the Austro-German forces...
...These reservations, however, do not reflect on Home's remarkable re-creation of an epic struggle...
...Charles Mangin shows up poorly, Robert Nivelle worst of all...
...He has also included much material and opinion, some of it controversial, about the men who directed the military destinies of France and Germany...
...At a steady walk the regiment began to cover the 400 yards to the wood...
...Verdun was the First War in microcosm...
...In The Price of Glory, Alistair Home, an English journalist and military historian, has written a magnificently realistic account of the battle of Verdun and thrown considerable light on its background and aftermath...
Vol. 46 • May 1963 • No. 11
